


to fly

by RosieClark



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, Captured, Gen, Hurt Lance (Voltron), Keith angst, Lance Angst, Lance whump, Nightmares, Torture, but can be seen as romantic, more memories, nothing too descriptive, platonic klance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:05:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27200128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RosieClark/pseuds/RosieClark
Summary: "I kept telling myself that, uh... that you'd show up from out of the vents. You know what I said as she ripped the flesh from my arms? I said 'You just wait until my team gets here’, ‘cause I didn’t want to give you away hiding in the ship. ‘Because he's going to drive you to your grave and I won't do a thing to stop him.' But you never came!"He shouts the last bit, his finger pointed at Keith's chest like a smoking gun. He hit his mark. Agonizingly, he lifts his head, and their eyes meet again, and suddenly Keith wants to look away, wants to never see his eyes again because they are so dull and void of life.Lance's breathing begins to slow. He lowers his arm. "You never came," he whispers again, and Keith, seemingly of his body's own accord, turns away and leaves.
Relationships: Keith & Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 64
Collections: Langst Halloween Exchange 2020





	to fly

**Author's Note:**

> whoop! so glad to be posting this langstron 2020 gift for the amazing @doodlelight! we haven't really chatted at all, but dude your art is amazing! i've never written klance before, and though i wrote it as platonic, you could see it as romantic if you wanted! i uh, also sorta forgot it was supposed to be halloween themed, but lets pretend this takes place around halloween ;)
> 
> thank you to the amazing mods for organizing this event, and a huge thanks to rue for the beta, you always manage to make things so much better!

He dreams of flying. His arms spread like eagle’s wings, the wind in his hair, carrying him wherever he desires. He breaks through the clouds, soaring higher and higher until the air feels thin and he starts to get cold. He breathes in deeply, looking at the world before him.

The world laid out for him to see.

*

Lance has lost all sense of time. The room he’s chained to makes it impossible to do so, so dark he doesn’t even remember the light. It feels like ages,  _ years _ since he was a free man. 

There are shouts outside his door, then the sound of scraping metal, and light blinds him. He shrinks away into the corner, a feeble attempt to shield himself from the unwanted claws, pulling him to the next wave of torture.

It never comes.

He hears his name. It’s been so long since he’s heard it it takes him a while to recognize it. 

Then, hands, cupping his face, pulling his head into a lap. Shouts, more laser fire. Lance dares to open his eyes, expecting to see the tell-tail mullet and purple eyes. Instead he focuses on brown eyes filled with unshed tears. Pidge.

He frowns, looking around. Hunk is beside him, trying in vain to stop the bleeding on a wound in his arm; Shiro in the hall, ripping apart Galra soldiers with his hands.

There is no one else. No red armor, no dark blade tearing through metal and flesh.

“Where's Keith?” he rasps, as strong arms support him. He can feel the urgency in their movements, but doesn’t care. His legs stop working. “Where's Keith?”

Shiro gently picks him up, cradling him in a way he hasn't been held since he was a boy.

“Where is he?” Lance asks again, his voice ragged from all the screaming. No one answers him, why aren’t they answering him? He doesn’t stop asking; not for the entire trip back to the castle, not even when he’s sedated and lies motionless on the makeshift cot in the back of Black, not even as Pidge, whos hardly said a word this whole time, starts to cry so hard Green takes off without her at the controls.

*

Lance is a healing pod overnight. Keith sleeps uncomfortably leaning against the side of the pod, ignoring everyone else's pleas to go to his own bed. He shivers, the artificial air vent turning on above him, but just pulls the collar of his jacket up. He’s slept through worse.

A beeping awakes him, and he rises. There is a red spot on his cheek from when it rested on his knee. He checks the pod, making sure everything is in order, and breathes a sigh of relief when it turns out Lance will be released any moment. He sighs, his hand resting on the cool glass, slumping against the weight of the world.

Lance looks so peaceful, sleeping like that. No pain on his face, no sign of the trauma he endured. The med bay doors slide open as the others stream in, alerted of their friends awakening. Keith straightens, his spine cracking and walks past them.

They don't try to stop him.

The pod hisses open and Lance falls into Hunks arms. He mumbles something, the stirs, but by the time he opens his eyes, Keith is already halfway to the training room.

*

Lance bleeds.

His brain is foggy, but still registers the pain. His fingers twitch uselessly at his sides, the nails bent and broken from clawing at the walls. He dares to look at his leg, the leg Haggar shattered, injections of quintessence accelerating his healing so she could repeat the process. Where there should be tattered flesh and bone is his leg, good as new. It makes him sick. 

But it's okay, he thinks. They’ll come. Any minute now. Any minute. His eyes close. Any minute now Keith will kick down the door, turning his blade on Haggar until she’s nothing. Maybe once Lance has done his time in the pod and Keith has cleaned up, they’ll train and he’ll let Keith win. Or maybe he’ll take him out for those alien fries, as a thank you for saving his life. Just maybe. But Keith is buying.

Lance grins. Red stains his teeth, but a dry laugh escapes his lips, quickly turning into a cough. Blood and spit join the filth on the floor. 

*

Lance doesn’t look at him anymore. In a way Keith is glad, he’s not sure if he could stomach seeing the emptiness in his once bright eyes, the paleness of his skin, the way he rarely smiles anymore.

He rarely does anything anymore.

On the chance Hunk convinces him to join them for meals, he just sits there, silent, picking at his food. Never eating it, never once engaging in conversation.

"He'll get better," Coran muses one night, as the others watch the door Lance had just disappeared into. His absence seems to make no difference, yet nothing is the same. "With time."

Keith doesn't want to be the one to call Coran a liar.

He goes straight to the training room, trying to clear his mind. Times like this, he hates the Paladin bond. Having Lance's unavoidable presence in his mind, no longer alive like it used to be, only dead weight now, was just a constant reminder of all that's changed.

*

It's a few weeks later when they find themselves alone again. Keith just wants a long training session. Instead he gets Lance. The blue paladin freezes for a second, the only indicator he knows Keith is there.

“So what? We’re just not talking anymore?”

Lance doesn't seem to hear him at first, picking up a towel and wiping his face before blinking slowly and turning his head slightly towards him, his eyes focusing on the door to his left.

"What?" he asks simply.

"You heard me," Keith snarls. "Don't pretend you didn't." He swallows the knot in his throat. "Oh come on Lance; don't do this to me. Don't pull this crap, just say  _ something _ ."

Lance just exhales.

"Yell at me! Tell me to go away, call me names, I don't care! Show me some of you razzle dazzle!" Keith even tries the jazz hands. It makes him feel stupid. Lance blinks. "Tell me it was my fault!" He roars, then softer. "Please."

Lance seems to consider this for a long moment before he inhales, straightens his shoulders and shrugs.

Keith chokes on his disbelief, his anger bursting through the seams of his chest at Lance’s non response, tightening around his heart. "You haven't said a word to me since we saved you, not one word. You haven't even looked at me." he says softer.

"We?" Lance's eyes lock with his.

Keith flinches. "Yes," he whispers hoarsely. "We."

Then, Lance does something unexpected. He throws his head back and laughs, the waves of broken sound echoing off the walls, like someone snipping the strings of a guitar. The corners of his lips twitch up in something that could be described as a smile, but was anything but.

"What's all this  _ we  _ stuff huh?" he demands. "Because, and call me crazy, but I distinctly remember not seeing your ugly mullet when everyone showed up to bust me out!"

Keith grimaces as the rancid undertone of his words, ignoring the sharp pain in his gut.

"You wanna know something?" Lance gulps, licking his chapped lips.

He says nothing.

"I was in that cell for a day, sure. But it felt like an eternity. And I gotta give them credit, those druids are the most imaginative tortures I've ever met. They really did the works, electricity, poisons, knives, blasters, even just brute force."

He winces. If it hadn’t been for that quiznacking escape pod, none of this would have happened. Routine mission, get in, get the info, get out. Except somewhere along the way they got seperated, and in his desperation to find his partner, Keith got stuck in an escape pod. A pod that blasted him halfway across the galaxy before the team found him, but by then it was too late. 

"And I would have fought back. Oh man you know I totally would've. But they injected me with some sort of poison, keeping me coherent enough to feel the pain, but my body stopped working. And when I died, because I  _ died _ there Keith, all Haggar had to do was snap her fingers and my heart would beat again."

Keith is going to vomit. He's certain.

"Let me ask you something, huh? Do you know what it feels like to drown in your own blood? To have your body be... brutally injured before an injection of quintessence makes it try to knit itself back together?"

"Stop," Keith whispers, but Lance doesn't hear him.

"Nobody ever talks about how the healing pods only heal the outside." He points to his temple. "Something in here is still broken. Something in here is gone, ripped from my soul in that cell, and I don't think I'll ever--" He stops himself, closing his eyes. His breathing is heavy through his nose.

"You know something? I..." His hand curls into a fist before he drives it sideways, into the wall, his head bowed. "I took everything they threw at me. It took it all with this big, stupid grin, making that witch mad at me, just to see her lose it. And she'd break my bones over and over because she wanted to shut me up, but you know me! Shutting my mouth is not an option." He swallows. "And of course I kept on dying and coming back until I couldn't feel anything anymore... but I didn't mind."

Keith can feel the waves of pain coming off of Lance, blurring into a tidal wave of fury.

"I kept telling myself that, uh... that you'd show up from out of the vents. You know what I said as she ripped the flesh from my arms? I said 'You just wait until my team gets here’, ‘cause i didn’t want to give you away hiding in the ship. ‘Because he's going to drive you to your grave and I won't do a thing to stop him.' But you never came!"

He shouts the last bit, his finger pointed at Keith's chest like a smoking gun. He hit his mark. Agonizingly, he lifts his head, and their eyes meet again, and suddenly Keith wants to look away, wants to never see his eyes again because they are so dull and void of life.

Lance's breathing begins to slow. He lowers his arm. "You never came," he whispers again, and Keith, seemingly of his body's own accord, turns away and leaves.

*

The second Keith got the alert from Pidge, he was already in uniform in the hanger. To be completely truthful, he hadn’t changed out of his uniform since the team found him and busted him out of that dang pod. He looks at her expectantly.

She nods. "I found him."

Keith is moving towards Red when a hand stops him. Shiro.

"You're not coming with us." The older man says firmly. Keith opens his mouth to protest, but he continues. "You haven't had a chance to recover, not fully at least, and right now, you're more a liability than an asset."

"I need to be there," Keith shouts angrily. For Lance. He needs to be there. “I should have been there breaking him out right now!”

Shiro shakes his head. "You're too emotionally invested in this Keith. You're heads not on straight. We can't risk losing you too."

Corans hands are on his shoulders, gently guiding him away. "Come young paladin," the Altean sooths. "The best place for you is right here, helping me prepare for their return."

*

He dreams of falling. The wind, once his ally is now working against him in every way. His body is useless as it falls, the ground getting closer and closer. Tears fly from his eyes. Lance tries to scream but no sound comes out. Even if it did, no one would hear it.

When he wakes up, sweaty and panting, the sickening thud of his body breaking against the dirt echo's through his head.

*

When the escape pod hisses open, Ketih tumbles out, his limbs cramping painfully, his mind repeating one thought over and over. 

_ Lance _ . 

His team rush over, exchanging worried glances. 

“What happened?” Allura cries. “When we lost communication we feared the worst until Pidge picked up on the signal you sent from the pod, but how--”

“Lance,” he manages to gasp out. Coran kneels beside him, applying pressure on a gash on his arm he didn’t even know existed. “They have him. We have to go back for Lance.” 

“Who’s they?” Someone, Hunk maybe, asks as Keith is helped into a sitting position. 

“Haggar and the druids.” 

Shiro’s gaze darkens. Keith knows he knows all too well what the druids were capable of. The fingers of his metal arm flex. 

They needed to find Lance. Before the druids get to him, before there's no more Lance to find. 

But in his heart Keith knows they’re too late. The time wasted in that pod was time Lance couldn’t afford. 

Lance would never be the same again. 

And it was all Keith's fault. 

*

In the end, it's Coran who steps in.

Honestly, Lance isn’t surprised. He’s standing in the hanger, his back towards the giant window, trying to summon the courage to raise his eyes. He hasn’t been able to look, let alone talk to Blue since his capture, and the lion has respected his wishes. Still Lance couldn’t get rid of the loneliness inside his head, the numbing silence that overtakes his every thought.

He doesn’t even notice when Coran comes up behind him.

“Aren’t you cold Number Three?”

Lance shakes his head. Coran sits on a workbench. He pats the spot next to him, more an order than an invite.

“Lance, we need to talk,” he says, his voice void of its usual pep.

“We need to huh?” Lance mumbles, sitting down, ignoring the frown on Corans face.

“Yes. We do.” There is no room for argument in his tone.

“About what?”

“About what happened. With Haggar.”

Despite himself, he flinches. Even the name makes his blood run cold and he reminds himself he's safe now.

"I don't want to," he finally says, looking at his feet. The Altean hums in response.

"Then we'll talk about me first."

At this, Lance looks up. The older man had never shared about his life on Altea, keeping that part of his story a mystery from all. Not even Allura would tell them anything. Lance wasn't even sure if she knew.

“I lost everything.” Coran says, and the lions stir. Lance feels their presence awaken at their old friend, surrounding their minds as if ready to lash out at anyone who speaks ill of the Altean. “My family? Killed before I could say goodbye. My friends? Sacrificed themselves to give us a chance. My planet? Destroyed, along with everything I ever cared about.” He sighs, long and weighted. “Being frozen in a pod doesn’t mean you stop feeling, it just means there's nothing you can do about it. I relived these memories until they became reality, and when I woke up?” His expression hardened. “I thought I’d never be the same.”

“I’m sorry.” Lance mutters, because that's all he can think of saying. He can feel it, the emotional toll it has on his mentor, dulled after so many years but still present.

Coran shakes his head. “No need my boy. I learned to cope.”

“How?” his cry is broken. “How do you cope with--”

“Hear me out son.” Corans hand is on his shoulder. “This is not the teams’ fault. This is not Keith's fault, and it is not your fault. It's Haggars.”

“But he left me there.”

“He didn’t. You just let yourself believe that he did.” Lance says nothing. Neither of them do for a long while. Coran sighs, leaning back slightly, his hands bracing his weight. “I always wanted to protect you young ones,” he says wistfully, his eyes trained on the stars before them. “To shelter you from the true horrors of the universe. Alas…” he trails off. “I’m sorry you had to go through this son. But you are strong. And this blinding anger you have inside of you needs to stop.”

“All I have is my anger!” Lance shouts, rising to his feet. “What else am I supposed to be? Happy? I died! And I could still be dead if Haggar wasn’t sick and twisted and I had no idea Keith was stuck on an escape pod joyride!!”

“Keith let you down. I know. But I also know he fought tooth and nail to get you back.”

Lance bites his teeth together, tensing his jaw, lapsing into silence. A stupid twist of bad luck on Keith’s part, a wrong turn into the wrong room is what led to his torture, just the wrong room to hide in. Bad luck, the thing Lance is truly angry at, not Keith. Keith is just easier because he can’t yell at bad luck. And suddenly, the sick feeling he gets whenever he thinks about his rescue is gone, and the morning seems brighter and wider, his own bed no longer the cause of nausea. He smiles, weakly. Its so small, so infinitesimally small, but for a second he looks like the Lance they used to know.

"I know." He finally admits.

"Then let go."

A sob, heavy and wet claws its way from Lance's mouth. His shoulders hunch over, shaking as he lets himself cry. Coran’s arms are around him, as if holding together the pieces of his fragile soul.

*

Lance finds Keith in the training room. Typical. He leans in the doorway.

"Hey."

Keith stops the exercise, stalking over to a bench on the side. "Hey." He takes a sip of water, his shoulders hunched. He won’t look at him. "Listen, I'm so--"

Lance stops him. "You don't have to apologize," he says softly. "I’m the one who should be saying I’m sorry - what I said was uncalled for.-"

“I was there. I should have gotten you out of there in minutes rather than a day. I’m sorry,” Keith insists. 

“...I forgive you, then.”

"Don't tell me unless you're sure," Keith says as he stands.

"Things happen," Lance starts, slowly. "It wasn’t your fault the pod left, He half grins. “You’re Keith, not superman. I shouldn't have put those expectations on you."

“I’m sorry.” It’s barely a whisper. Keith can’t even look him in the eyes. "I'm sorry I let you down."

"No, no--wow, that definitely sounded better in my head," Lance stammers, trying to reword his thoughts ."What I mean is... " He runs his fingers through his hair. It flops back onto his head lifelessly. "I should have trusted myself to get through it, instead of just waiting for you to come rescue me. And I should have had faith in the entire team, not just you."

“Stop that,” Keith's voice is hoarse with emotion. ”It’s not your fault, I’m the one that left you there!” He grows louder with each word. "Lance I'm sorry!" Keith's hands rest on his knees as he bows forward. "I'm so sorry."

Lance doesn’t know what to do. Should he comfort Keith, would it mean anything after all he’s said? Is a hug in order?? He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, standing back awkwardly. "Lets both be sorry?" he suggests, rubbing the back of his neck unconsciously. "Fair enough?"

"You really shouldn't be," Keith mumbles, as he rises, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He still won't look at him.

Lance lets out a sigh, his decision made, closing the space between them in two steps. He rests his hand on Keith's shoulder. "Then neither should you." He tells him frankly, a weight lifted off his shoulders. In his mind, Blue stirs, as if awakening from a deep slumber.

Keith's eyes meet his.

*

Lance flies.

His hands on Blue's controls, the humming of his lion in his mind, he finally feels like he can  _ breath _ .

The stars zip past him as he moves forward, always forward, never looking back. He lets out a whoop, long and loud so the whole galaxy can hear him, breaking off into laughter.

He  _ flies _ .

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! comments/kudos are always welcome!


End file.
